Waterless
DishwasherUniversity
of New South Wales students have won a 7,000 Euro first
prize for developing a revolutionary dishwasher that uses
carbon dioxide instead of water. The trio won a world-wide
design competition held by electronic appliance giant Electrolux
that asked students to design a product consumers might
need in the year 2015. The Rockpool dishwasher, designed
by Douglas Nash, Oystein Lie and Ross Nicholls, beat back
competition from products developed by students from Brazil,
China, Czech Republic, Portugal, Slovakia, Sweden, United
Kingdom and the United States. The judging panel was impressed
with the environmental qualities that the waterless, chemical-free
dishwasher could provide consumers in the future. "It
uses carbon dioxide to clean the dishes. Under pressure
the carbon dioxide takes on special properties of a liquid
and a gas so it dissolves grease and oil and it has no surface
tension so it will cover everything, like a gas. It's ideal
because there are no moving parts in the machine so it's
great for quietness," said Nash, one of the students.
"All the products entered in the competition were compact,
multi-functioning and multi-tasking and also they took into
account environmental issues.

Bill
Gates' Inbox SpammedRush
of spams in the email box irritates one and all. When you
are irritated the next time just imagine how Bill Gates
tolerates. The Microsoft Corp. Chairman is the world's most
spammed person with 4 million emails flooding in his inbox
each day, most of them spams. But practically an entire
department at the company he founded is dedicated to ensuring
that nothing 'unwanted' gets into his inbox, the company's
Chief Executive said. In most offices, including Prime Minister
Paul Martin's, spam is filtered out. But so much is coming
in that it's jamming up systems, causing even software moguls
like Gates to take notice. Spammers are constantly finding
ways to get around efforts to block their messages, which
are sent out in the millions. Fighting spam is also big
business. Spam or junk e-mails, regarded as perhaps the
biggest threat to the internet, are unsolicited messages
sent to many e-mail accounts simultaneously, often indiscriminately.

News
versus Chatting According
to a survey conducted in Britain, one in three Internet
browsers is likely to have a news site as his/her home page
rather than a chat site. According to the Daily Mail, a
research for broadband provider Pipex found that a third
of computer users had a news or current affairs site as
their home page. The top three home page items for men were
news, sports and weather, while for women it was more likely
to a photograph of their partner or children. The poll of
1,000 adults found that people in Wales and the South West
were most likely to have a family picture on their screen
when they log on to the internet.

Scientists
Finds a Substitute for OilScientsists
at New Zealand's state-owned Industrial Research Ltd (IRL)
have found a method of purifying hydrogen, using ironsands,
which may help the world to develop a clean-burning replacement
for oil. The process uses the North Island west coast's
unique volcanic ironsands to extract pure hydrogen from
water. The hydrogen could eventually replace oil in both
cars and electricity generation. The process of splitting
water to extract the hydrogen needs a lot of energy, but
scientists believe the energy could be supplied by sawdust
and other biomass wastes from the forestry industry. According
to IRL hydrogen project manager Ian Brown, "People
have had ideas about using iron oxides but as far as we
can tell they have never figured out how to make it happen.
No one has got it to demonstration plant stage. No one has
contemplated using ironsands. No one has contemplated combining
it with biomass technologies. It's the whole package of
ideas that is unique." "All the existing fuel
cell technologies internationally demand high-purity hydrogen
because they have components that respond badly to contaminant
gases. That is one of the difficulties of developing a fuel
cell economy," he added. He also said that New Zealand
had millions of tonnes of ironsand and had already developed
an infrastructure to extract it for the steel mill at Glenbrook
and for exports to Japan. There would be no need to extract
large amounts, as the ironsand could be reused many times
over.

Mobile
Phones to Oust Land Phones SoonA
survey conducted by polling firm Mori, has revealed that
people prefer to use their mobile phones more than their
land line. According to the BBC, a research by electronics
giant Nokia shows that more and more people use their mobile
phone for every call they make or take. More than 45 million
people in the UK, Germany, US and South Korea now only use
a mobile. The research showed that people keep their fixed
line phone because call charges are lower, but most of those
questioned said the future was definitely mobile. While
Home phones were used for longer calls, conversations on
mobiles tended to be shorter, between mobiles and to friends.
In the UK 69 percent of those questioned said they turned
to their fixed phone because it was still cheaper to use
than a mobile. The survey also showed that it is not just
voice calls that are going wireless. Some of those questioned
said they were looking to use a mobile or wireless service
to get net access within the next couple of years.